It seems that every few weeks, we see another piece in the news about a building fire – a restaurant, a factory, a warehouse. Words like “ablaze”, “engulfed”, and “completely destroyed” appear often. Reported damages often run into millions. Businesses often fold after a fire – every day that they are offline is a day that their customers are finding a competitor to meet their needs.

In most cases*, the fire brigade receives a call within 5 minutes of discovering the fire. However, many things can delay the discovery of a fire; for example, the building might be unoccupied (like many office buildings and warehouses after hours). Delays in calling the brigade can also happen due to occupants investigating and/or fighting the fire, or even escaping the building. A direct brigade connection eliminates all of these potential delays by sending an alarm message to the brigade immediately on detection without requiring the delays of human intervention.

Fire alarms help - buildings fitted with fire detection systems suffer less damage, as both the expected fire size and damage where the building has an automatic fire detection system are less than a third of those buildings without. However, the faster fire detection of a fire alarm system and the occupants reacting to the alarm, rather than the fire, results in the reduction in brigade call times. A direct brigade connection eliminates even the alarm reaction time, alerting the brigade even as the evacuation begin to sound.

Sprinkler systems show a similar reduction in both fire size and damage, to less than half that of similar buildings where sprinklers were not fitted. However, the function of a sprinkler system is normally to contain a fire (rather than extinguish it), and a call to the brigade still needs to be made as soon as possible. Again, a direct brigade connection eliminates any delay by alerting the brigade as soon as the water begins to flow.

It is true that as detection sensitivity increases, so to do false alarms increase. The best solution is to eliminate false alarms, by having alarm systems that fit both the type and purpose of the building – there is little point in having a smoke detector directly outside a kitchen or bathroom, where it will often activate from the steam produced by a shower or the byproducts of cooking! However, a thermal detector in the same scenario should not alarm until there is a genuine.

The major downside of false alarms is that it results in the brigade being turned out unnecessarily; and if this happens too often, can result in an invoice from the New Zealand Fire Service. However, we have seen some success in getting these false alarm callout invoices reversed when we have been able to show that the people responsible for the fire alarm systems are genuinely working to eliminate or minimize false alarms, such as changing inappropriate detectors, or updating older fire equipment.

* Based on research conducted by P.G. Holborn, P.F. Nolan, and J. Golt in 2003/04, using real fire data from over 2000 fires investigations conducted from 1996 to 2000 provided by the London Fire Brigade. (An analysis of fire sizes, fire growth rates and times between event using data from fire investigations, Holborn, Nolan & Golt - published in the Fire Safety Journal 39, 2004)